Tom The Mail Man Presents: The 710S Tour
Tom the Mail Man is from Monroe, Georgia – a country town about an hour outside Atlanta. He’s a multi-genre artist who emphatically avoids putting a label to his music, instead focusing on creating a world for his fans to come together as one community. Recently, he’s been featured in PAPER magazine and Pigeons & Planes, performed at Life is Beautiful, partnered with Trojan Magnum and UPROXX for a documentary feature, and racked up more than 65 million streams across DSPs.TikTok | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud
Benefit For The People of Turkiye and Syria
Benefit For The People of Turkiye and Syria Chris Stamey & Peter Holsapple Johnny Folsom 4 Too Much Fun John Howie, Jr the Rosewood Bluff The VeldtAll proceeds go to Turkey / Syria Earthquake Relief Fund
Declan McKenna – The Big Return
“Unstoppable Gen Z Icon” – The Big Issue“The wonder boy of British Music” – Attitude“A brilliant second album from indie’s boy wonder” – ★★★★★ DORK“Spaced-out storytelling from an indie wunderkind…a delight” – ★★★★ Q Magazine“Star-spangled and confident AF… ‘Zeros’ is a lot of fun” – ★★★★ DIY Magazine“McKenna’s future looks intriguing…the work of an artist broadening his scope” – ★★★★ The Guardian“electric, entertaining and thought-provoking” – ★★★★ NME“McKenna is to Bowie what Sam Fender is to Bruce Springsteen” – ★★★★ Evening Standard“Declan is proving a rare talent to watch” – ★★★★ Daily Star“Zeros is the sound of an artist pushing his creative development, and enjoying himself as he does so. Exciting stuff” – ★★★★ The IndependentIn late 2019, Declan Mckenna headed out to Nashville to record his second album, Zeros, with producer Jay Joyce. By September 2020, he was battling out for a number 1 record with The Rolling Stones. “Nashville is a great place to record because it’s filled with a lot of creative people and music heads trying to escape LA.” This idea of a refuge is fitting for Declan, who wanted to be away from the pressures of London or the drab consistency of home, allowing for an intimacy and a desire to explore on this super galactic album that can only really be pursued in a place that is unfamiliar. Zeros is playful, wonderfully strange and intensely musical, but there’s a dark shadow looming throughout. It’s Coors Light and cowboy boots escaping a Silicon Valley dystopia.Whilst Declan might have lost that particular battle by a whisker to Jagger and his cohorts on the very last day of sales, it showed just how far Declan had come since his arrival as a slight in stature, big ball of fizzing teenage energy only a few years earlier. The boy most likely to had very quickly become the young man to beat.But for all the chart noise and colourful media presence, it’s the music that does the lionshare of the talking. Zeros is a curious, unique and bold record that is teeming with fresh ideas and nods back to eras that have no right to head up the charts in the year 2020. It’s a very British trait to focus on age, but it simply has no right to be conceived by a twenty one year-old who was younger still in its writing. Opening track, You Better Believe!!! comes in hot, aggressive and excitable. It’s a mean song, its accusational. You’ve changed. You’re gonna die. The world’s gonna end and everyone is going to forget you. It combines a retro, 70s space-race inspired energy with a modern tale of anxiety. Musically and lyrically, it provides a perfect blueprint to the album: ‘So you know how it feels to wait at Heaven’s gate for God,/ Watching your requiem on a screen… I’m sorry my dear,/ The Asteroids here.’Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
Nation of Language
Brooklyn-based synth auteurs Nation of Language first arrived to most in 2020 as one of the most heralded new acts of recent memory, having only released a handful of singles but already earning high-praise from the likes of NME, FADER, Stereogum, Pitchfork, etc.. Inspired by the early new-wave and punk movements, the band quickly earned a reputation for delivering frenzied nights of unconventional bliss to rapt audiences, and established themselves as bright young stars emerging from a crowded NYC landscape prior to their release of one of the most critically acclaimed debut albums of the year — Introduction, Presence. The band’s ability to blend the upbeat with a healthy dose of sardonic melancholy made it a staple on year-end ‘Best of’ lists, led PASTE magazine to dub the album ‘The most exciting synth-pop debut in years’ , and landed the band major radio play from the BBC, KCRW, KEXP, SiriusXM and countless others.Their 2021 follow up, A Way Forward then saw the band pushing even further into analog electronic landscapes while channeling a ferocious energy on singles like ‘Across that Fine Line’ & ‘This Fractured Mind.’ With NME now dubbing their sophomore album ‘A true modern-day classic’ and Rough Trade tabbing it as one of its Top Albums of the year, the band has gone on to headline a string of packed shows both domestically and Internationally in ’22 and well into 2023.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | Soundcloud
Caitlyn Smith – The Great Pretender Tour: Solo
Last year, Monument Records’ powerhouse vocalist Caitlyn Smith released High, which Forbes called “captivating” and the Tennessean stated, “showcases an artist finally in control of her life and career.” It was the first half of a record that the critically acclaimed singer/songwriter self-produced. Now Smith is poised to release the complete project, adding six new songs to make her full record, High & Low, due April 14.For Smith, the making of High & Low represented a metamorphosis. Looking back, the award-winning songwriter, who has graced the pages of both TIME Magazine and The New York Times and been named to Rolling Stone’s 10 country artists to know and Paste ’s 10 country artists to watch, realized she, as many do in the era of social media, had celebrated the “highs” of life publicly – while navigating the “lows” in private. Instead of showing vulnerability, it was easier to pretend everything was fine. But over the course of writing and producing High & Low, Smith learned to peel back the curtain, embracing all aspects of her life, including the “lows” she once held so close to vest.Available now, “Lately” is another taste of what’s to come from High & Low with Billboard calling it “yet another testament to her ineluctable talents.” The track delves even further into the human experience, detailing the attempt to overcome loss using a series of distractions. The additional five new tracks balance 2022’s critically-acclaimed High, celebrated by NPR as “her most fully realized project yet,” with High & Low capturing the full picture of who Smith is as an artist and as a creator – where embracing the yin and yang simply makes you more human.While writing, producing, and recording her latest album, the Pollstar “Hotstar” has also spent the last few years on the road opening for George Strait, Reba, Little Big Town and Old Dominion which led to her debut on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” after Clarkson saw Smith’s opening “Strait to Vegas” set, taking to Twitter to share praise for the performance. She has also performed on Late Night with Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, The TODAY Show, and CBS This Morning. Last year, Smith headlined her High & Low Tour, as well as headed overseas to perform as part of C2C in London. Stay tuned here and on social media for the latest news and tour dates for Smith.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube
Sloan
Sloan is a Toronto-based rock band from Halifax, Nova Scotia who first performed in spring of 1991. Comprised of bassist and vocalist Chris Murphy, guitarists/vocalists Jay Ferguson and Patrick Pentland, and drummer/vocalist Andrew Scott, the quartet possessed a rare chemistry from the start. There are so many moments peppered throughout the 30-year history of Canadian indie rock heroes Sloan that set them well apart from the pack. From the band’s earliest home studio recordings that married their pop smarts with fizzy, fuzzed out guitars, right up to later efforts that contain multitudes in their track listings, ranging from Dylanesque streams of consciousness to short, sharp blasts of power pop — Somehow, it all remains quintessentially Sloan.The band are credited as being a main instigator for the Canadian East Coast alternative scene of the early 90s, garnering comparisons to the Seattle Grunge movement on the opposite coast. Over the course of their quarter-century career, Sloan have amassed an outstanding collection of over 250 songs and more than 30 singles with airplay at Canadian Rock Radio. Sloan have received nine Juno Award nominations and won for Best Alternative Album in 1997. The band was named one of Canada’s top five bands of all-time in a CBC critics poll.Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook | Spotify | YouTube | TikTok
Protomartyr
Since their 2012 debut No Passion All Technique, the Detroit post-punk band Protomartyr have mastered the art of evoking place: the grinding Midwest humility of their hometown, as well as the x-rayed elucidation of America that comes with their vantage. Protomartyr—vocalist Joe Casey, guitarist Greg Ahee, drummer Alex Leonard, and bassist Scott Davidson—have become synonymous with caustic, impressionistic assemblages of politics and poetry, the literal and oblique.The group’s sixth album, recorded at Sonic Ranch in Tornillo, Texas, is called Formal Growth In The Desert. And though frontman Joe Casey did have a humbling experience staring at awe-inspiring Sonoran rock formations and reckoning with his own smallness in the scheme of things – as recounted in the single “Elimination Dances” – the title is not necessarily a nod to the sandy expanses of the southwest. Detroit, too, is like a desert. “The desert is more of a metaphor or symbol,” Casey says, “of emotional deserts, or a place or time that seems to lack life.” The desert brings an existential awareness that is ultimately internal.The “growth” came from a period of colossal transition for Casey, including the death of his mother. Now 45, Casey had lived in the family home in northwest Detroit all his life until 2021, when a surge of break-ins signaled that it was time to move out. As with all touring artists, the pandemic years also brought on other inner quandaries about the purpose and feasibility of a musician’s life.But life does go on, and Casey describes the great theme of Formal Growth In The Desert as an embrace and acknowledgment of that fact: a 12-song testament to “getting on with life,” even when it feels impossibly hard. “I was trying to find a way forward after some pretty heavy things, without lyrically resorting to, Oh my god, my life sucks,” Casey says. “I was trying to see what was beyond the trouble.” The titles of the two opening songs—the moody “Make Way” followed by the charging ennui of “For Tomorrow”—complete that thought.The band’s music—more spacious and dynamic than ever—pulled him up, too. Guitarist Greg Ahee, who co-produced Formal Growth In The Desert alongside Jake Aron (Snail Mail, L’Rain), knew what Casey was going through. Conceptualizing the music, he considered how to make it all “like a narrative film.” Having recently scored a pair of short films, Ahee found himself immersed in the cinematic Spaghetti Western music of Ennio Morricone. “I started to write at home on a piano and on a keyboard and then play along to short films, and watch how you can affect and heighten moods as you play,” Ahee explains.The filmic sensibility is manifest in Casey’s storytelling, too, whether he’s critiquing ominous techno-capitalism or processing aging, the future, and the possibility of love. Casey calls the centerpiece, “Graft Vs. Host,” written in the immediate wake of his mother’s death, the heaviest song on the record, but it is also among Protomartyr’s most beautiful. It opens with an ominous sprawl before Casey’s sweet, coiling melody buoys the subject matter: “Sadness running through my mind/She wouldn’t want to see me live this way,” he sings, an earnest inquiry into how grief manages to eventually make way for other emotions. “My mom wouldn’t want me to be depressed about her passing for the rest of my life,” Casey explains.Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook
The Crystal Casino Band
Originating as a group of friends from The George Washington University, The Crystal Casino Band combines the vibes of early 2010s-era indie that littered Tumblr dashboards with increasingly introspective and socially-conscious lyrics. Their music, while both relatable and insanely catchy, is simultaneously raw and uncut– adding a layer of authenticity and grounding the band firmly in their DC’s roots.The band has shared the stage with powerhouse artists including SHAED, Judah and The Lion, and more. Known for their high energy shows and easy-listening music, The Crystal Casino Band released their most daring album yet, “Maryland House”, in January. The album is the band’s most complex and varietal album yet and showcases their love for the DMV area throughout the 13 song experience.Instagram | TikTok | Facebook | Spotify
4th Annual Cupid’s Jam – Benefit Concert for TABLE
The 4th Annual Cupid’s Jam – A Concert Benefiting TABLE!School of Rock House Bands take the Main Stage of The Cat’s Cradle, from:* Chapel Hill (your host)* Cary* Chesapeake, VA* Raleigh* Wake Forest* WilmingtonThis will be a festival afternoon of amazing music by the region’s best young musicians!TABLE delivers healthy food and nutrition education to children in Orange County, North Carolina. Learn more about this important organization at: https://tablenc.org$10 donation at the door requested and appreciated!Facebook
Celaris, Earther, Antigone, The Cardinal Endeavor
CelarisHailing from Raleigh, NC, Celaris is a progressive metal band that has opened up for acts such as Thornhill, Moodring, Rings of Saturn, and Strawberry Girls. Influenced by groups like Veil of Maya, Periphery, ERRA, The Contortionist, and TesseracT, Celaris set out to make a mark on the same scene to make a mark on them. Their debut album, “In Hiding” (produced by the legendary Jamie King), and their newest single “Out Of Phase”, are out on all streaming platforms. EartherEarther is an indie rock band from Raleigh, NC. Started in 2017 by three best friends in their garage, the band has quickly grown from basement show warriors to packing out larger clubs and touring the country. Earther abides by the “less is more” mentality – packing the sonic intricacy and fullness usually reserved for larger bands into a three-person roster. Guitarist Henry Boyd and drummer Daniel Ayers draw from emo, punk, and post-rock influences to create a dynamic instrumental section, while vocalist and bassist Joel Bloch uses surreal, dream-inspired lyricism to express his own life experiences and give the band a relatable, poignant voice. Their new single, “Hellbent,” is available to stream on all digital platforms and purchase on iTunes now! AntigoneHailing from Raleigh, North Carolina, decibel-crushing quintet Antigone (an-TIG-ə-nee) are just beginning to leave their mark on the region. Antigone takes cues from modern metalcore, alternative rock, and grunge-infused metal to create a signature wall of sound that characterizes their high-energy live performances. Putting a new twist on early metal-core as mastered by the likes of Killswitch Engage, Trivium, and In Flames, Antigone are grateful to contribute their production and performing talents to the genre they’ve loved since they first picked up their instruments.Antigone’s newest single, “Pull the Plug” is one of their heaviest yet. It’s a must-listen for fans of bands such as I Prevail and Of Mice & Men.
